Where GotBusted gets its records — all 33 counties

Every source behind the databases, why some counties arrive differently than others, and what we refuse to collect.

By GotBusted News · August 14, 2026

<p>People ask where the data comes from often enough that it deserves its own page. The short answer is that all of it is public and all of it is obtained the way the agency intended it to be obtained.</p> <h2>County booking rosters</h2> <p>Most New Mexico county detention centers publish a current inmate roster on the web. Those rosters are the primary source, and they are re-read every six hours. Different counties use different vendor systems, so what each one publishes varies — some include charges, bond and a booking photo, others publish a name and a date and nothing else.</p> <h2>Public records requests</h2> <p>Not every county publishes a roster you can simply read. Where a site's terms prohibit automated collection, we do not collect from it automatically. We request the records through the Inspection of Public Records Act instead, and several counties are in the database for exactly that reason. It is slower and it is the right way to do it.</p> <h2>The court calendar</h2> <p>Criminal case data comes from the New Mexico court system's public calendar, covering district and magistrate courts across all 13 judicial districts.</p> <h2>Missing persons</h2> <p>Missing person records come from NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, run by the U.S. Department of Justice.</p> <h2>The sex offender registry</h2> <p>Registry records come from the New Mexico Department of Public Safety and are published under NMSA 1978 § 29-11A-5.1. That page is a periodic capture rather than a live feed, which is why the date it was captured is printed at the top of it. The state registry is always the authority.</p> <h2>What we will not do</h2> <p>We do not buy data from brokers. We do not scrape private sources. We do not obtain records through anyone's login, and we do not accept a site's click-through terms on somebody else's behalf to get at data behind them. Where a source is closed to us, the honest answer is that the county is thinner in our database than it could be, and we would rather say that than work around it.</p> <p>We also never publish juvenile records, from any source, on any page.</p> <h2>When a county goes quiet</h2> <p>Every source is monitored. If a county's roster stops returning records, changes shape, or moves to a new vendor, that raises an alert rather than silently going stale — which is the failure mode that matters most for a records site, because a page that quietly stops updating looks identical to one where nothing happened.</p>